The Elder Scroll series has undoubtedly become a benchmark for how an RPG title should be. However, readers will be intrigued to know that Bethesda never planned for this series to take this route. In fact, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, which started the franchise in 1994, was supposed to be a simple action-adventure title.
Ted Peterson, a former Bethesda designer, was recently interviewed by IGN at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024. During this interview, Peterson revealed how Arena was never meant to be an RPG. Back in 1994, the American publisher wasn’t a big name like it is now, so they didn’t want to risk competing in a genre [RPG] that was already competitive.
The former Bethesda designer revealed how a prolonged and stressful development process transformed the originally planned action-adventure title into an RPG. Moreover, the finished game was full of bugs and glitches, which Bethesda incorporated into their gameplay rather than trying to fix them. One such case was transforming a glitch preventing a character from exiting a village into a cursed village quest.
“We said, ‘It’s not a bug. It’s the story of this town.’ This one character who never had a name, they were just a bit of decoration, it was all because of him. He cursed this town because there was a princess and she had a wombat she loved, and the king was mean to the wombat, so Ius cursed the town and said she never could leave”
It took Bethesda 12 months to develop The Elder Scrolls: Arena, which is a pretty long developmental process, considering the other titles of that era. Furthermore, this 1994-released title isn’t even considered a success but it paved the way for future Elder Scrolls iterations to change the RPG landscape. Following the release of The Elder Scrolls: Arena, Peterson began working on a Deluxe edition, which eventually led to Bethesda building The Elder Scrolls franchise worth millions.
How was Bethesda plagued with accidental plagiarism in the past?
Plagiarism is the elephant in the room that every publisher, including Bethesda, tries to avoid like the plague. However, the American publishers found themselves involved in accidental plagiarism in the past. Peterson revealed that the situation arose when all Bethesda employees were randomly coming up with names for the cities and villages on The Elder Scrolls: Arena map.
“People would wander into the office and write a name on the map. 50 percent were original. Some they thought were original.”
Morrowind is a name Elder Scroll fans are well aware of, as it is one of the provinces in this series. Moreover, this was also the setting for the third installment of The Elder Scroll series. However, the American publisher was unaware that they plagiarized this name from the word “Morrowindl” featured in Terry Brooks’ Shannara.
Ted Peterson claimed they never ripped off other content on purpose. So these days, Bethesda runs everything via a lawyer to avoid getting into a plagiarism mess. It is interesting to learn how the development of the first Elder Scrolls title was quite chaotic, but it eventually led to the creation of the beloved RPG series.
